Tiny Raven

The tent flap did not open, it was thrown back with the force of a man who had never learned to ask permission before entering a room.

Bronze armor gleams in the lamplight, the lion crest on his breastplate catching the glow like a predatory eye. He filled the doorway for a moment, surveying the scene with the cold calculation of a general assessing a battlefield.

“How picturesque,” he said, his voice pitched to carry. “The King of Othara, covered in gore like a butcher. The King of Kareth, playing nursemaid to…” he stopped inside, boot crunching on grit, his gaze sweeping to the bedroll where Alessia lay pale and unconscious, her Tharon braids dark against the linen, her complexion olive even in sickness. “…a Tharon spy?”

Odrian didn’t move from where he was kneeling.

His knees were locked in the blood, his hands still wet with it. He should stand. He should rise to meet Nomaros like a king, but his body had forgotten how, or his mind had forgotten to tell it to.

Over twenty-four hours without sleep, and the adrenaline was turning sour in his veins.

“Nomaros, your timing is… immaculate. As always.” His voice came out wrong, rough and cracked, a croak rather than his usual theatrical boom. He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help.

He tried to stand, his heel slipping in the blood. He caught himself hard against the bedframe, pain lancing through his lower back.

Mistake.

The wince showed weakness, and Odrian could already see Nomaros cataloging it.

“She’s not a spy.” He forced his shoulders back, lifting his chin. His eyes felt gritty, burning. “She’s a… civilian asset. A translator. We intercepted Tharon correspondence three days ago, and she—” Stop. He realized he was saying too much, rambling, filling the silence because silence felt like drowning. “She has value. Strategic value.”

He gestured vaguely at Alessia’s unconscious form, but his hand was shaking. From fatigue, from the sheer terror of the last hour. He had to curl his fingers into his palm to hide it.

“She was injured tonight. My men mistook her for…” he trailed off, uncertain how to finish the sentence. “It was a mistake. A panic, not infiltration.”

His gaze flicked to Stella, sleeping heavily against Dionys, and something in his chest twisted tight enough to hurt. He turned back to Nomaros, knowing he looked unhinged. Covered in gore, swaying on his feet, defending a Tharon woman.

“Why are you here, Nomaros? Come to inspect my bedrolls? Or just to gawk at the wounded?” The sarcasm landed flat, missing its usual edge.

“Strategic value,” Nomaros repeated, tasting the words like soured wine. He stepped further into the tent, his shadow swallowing the light from the brazier, stopping just close enough that Odrian had to tilt his head back to meet his eyes. “How fascinating. A Tharon translator of such inestimable worth that the King of Othara personally bathes in her blood to preserve her. Tell me, Odrian: Does she translate the location of their command posts, or only the color of their undergarments?”

His gaze slid past Odrian to the child—dark-haired, olive-skinned, unmistakably Tharon—curled against Dionys like a parasite. “And this? A brat dragged from the slums of Ellun? Or perhaps a more permanent attachment?” He let the implication hang, heavy and venomous. “I have heard rumors of a sickly girl haunting your tents, coughing her lung-rot into our grain stores. A plague-carrier weapon wrapped in rags, perhaps? How convenient that she arrives just as our supply lines thin.”

Dionys stood. Not quickly, his joints were stiff from holding Stella through the night, but he rose to his full height between Nomaros and the bedroll, broad shoulders blocking his view of Alessia and the girl both.

“Not lung-rot.” His voice was gravel raw, barely above a rumble. “Fever. Broke three hours ago. She’s clean.”

He didn’t look at Nomaros. He looked at the wound in his argument, the weakness in his logic, and he speared it.

“She’s not a weapon.” He lifted his gaze, slate-grey and flat as a shield wall. “She’s a child. You’re frightening her.”

He shifted his weight, the leather of his armor creaking, and his fingers drifted to the hilt of his dagger. Not threatening, just there.

“Odrian’s right. The woman’s an asset.” He tilted his chin toward Alessia’s unconscious form, the bloody bandages stark against the linen. “But she’s bleeding out while you posture. If you’re here to help, move. If not—” he stepped sideways, opening the tent flap with one heavy gesture. “The curfew applies to kings, too.”

“Move?” Nomaros laughed, a single sharp crack of sound that filled the tent like a whip-crack. “I do not move for shadows, Dionys. I crush them.”

He stepped forward, ignoring the open flap, ignoring the dagger at his hip, until he loomed over the bedroll where the Tharon woman lay. The scent of blood rose, thick, primitive, and undeniable.

His lip curled.

“An asset.” He tasted the word again, spitting it into the space between them. “A Tharon asset, bleeding out in the King of Othara’s private quarters, having violated curfew, provoked sentry action, and disrupted the entire western picket. How… convenient that this valuable translator was skulking near the grain stores after dark. How fortunate that she requires such tender, personal protection.”

He turned his gaze back to Odrian, the blood-soaked, trembling wretch who dared to call himself king, and let his eyes narrow with deliberate, cutting slowness. “You reek of sentiment, cousin. It is unseemly. And it is dangerous.”

His boot nudged Alessia’s bare foot. “She was running with medicine. For the brat, I presume? Or perhaps delivering it to someone in the Tharon lines?” He crouched, not to help but to inspect, his fingers hovering near her throat, intrusive and possessive. “Tharon braids. Tharon skin. Tharon blood on your rugs.”

He straightened, dusting his hands as though they were contaminated, and fixed Odrian with a stare that could freeze wine. “I will have her moved to the stockade for questioning. Tonight. Along with the child. If she has strategic value, it will be extracted properly—by the Formicari. Not by moon-eyed kings playing at heroism.”

He gestured to the shadows outside, where his own guard waited. “Unless you can explain, precisely, why a thief from Ellun rates royal blood and royal tears… I suggest you step aside.”

Odrian stepped forward. Stumbled, really, his foot catching on the blood-slick rug. He placed himself between Nomaros and the bedroll, his knees locked. The tremor in his thighs was visible, a hair’s breadth from buckling.

Over twenty-four hours without sleep, and the tent swam at the edges of his vision.

“Stockade?” His voice cracked, too high, and he cleared his throat, trying to scrape together the theatricality that served him like armor.

It came out thin.

“She’s—not—going anywhere. Askarion says she’ll hemorrhage if you move her. Gut wound. You want to interrogate a corpse, Nomaros, or do you want—”

What do I want?

Odrian’s mind blanks, white and buzzing, as he grasps for the strategic thread he had dropped somewhere in the blood and panic.

“She speaks Tharon. High dialect. The harbor cant, military argot, trade dialects—”

He was babbling, the words tumbling out too fast, too eager. “She’s useless to you dead. She’s—she knows the patrol schedules, the black market routes, she can identify Tharon commanders by voice alone, she’s—”

Shut up. Shut up, you fool.

He caught himself, jaw snapping shut, but the damage was done. He’d said too much, made her too valuable, turning her from a suspicious stray into a prize.

His hand found the tent post, gripping until the wood bit into his palm, and he dragged a ragged breath that hitched halfway. “The child stays. She’s—the girl’s just a child. A civilian. Non-combatant. You move her, you violate every code of—”

He blinks and the tent spins. Nomaros’s face doubling before resolving into one sneering mask.

“She’s under Otharan protection,” he finished, weaker than intended, his shoulders slumping despite his effort to straighten them. “Council recognizes camp sovereignty. My tent, my jurisdiction. You want her, you call a full Council vote. At dawn, after I’ve slept.”

He leaned harder against the post, blood sticky on his cheek, realizing too late that he just admitted he was in no condition to stop Nomaros if he decided to take Alessia now.

Nomaros watched the tremor in Odrian’s hands, the way his fingers whitened against the tent post, the slump of his shoulders that no amount of royal posturing could disguise.

He stepped closer, his shadow swallowing the space between them, until the bronze of his breastplate nearly touched Odrian’s chiton. “You blurting out Council intelligence to save a whore’s life does not constitute strategic value. It constitutes compromise.”

His gaze flicked to Alessia’s slack face, then back to Odrian’s bleary eyes. “You say she knows harbor cant? Patrol schedules? And yet she was intercepted not near your precious intelligence tent, but skulking by the grain stores. Alone, after curfew, with a child coughing fever into our air.” He leaned in, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper that chilled the tent’s close air. “If she is such an asset, why does she bleed in your bedchamber rather than answer questions in chains? Why does the King of Othara shake rather than convene the Council?”

He straightened, cloak snapping at his heels, and turned his profile to Odrian like a blade being presented for inspection.

“Camp sovereignty ends where Council security begins. As High King, I do not require your permission to detain a suspected spy, nor do I wait for dawn when the threat is now,” he gestured sharply toward Stella, still clutched against Dionys, “potentially incubating plague in our midst.”

He snapped his fingers. From the tent entrance, his two guards stepped inside, boots heavy on the blood soaked rugs.

“One hour, Odrian. Wash the blood from your face and prepare your defense. We convene the Council tonight to determine whether you’ve harbored a spy… or simply disgraced yourself.”

He paused at the flap, glancing back with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “One hour. Try not to bleed on the voting tablets.”

─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─

Nomaros struck the butt of his scepter against the war-map table, the sound ringing sharp as a hammered nail through the command tent. Eleven thrones of campaign chairs scraped and settled in the dust.

Let them look. Let them see the King of Othara swaying on his feet, still stained with her blood, dark circles carved as deep as trenches beneath his eyes.

“Brothers,” Nomaros said, his voice honeyed as he spread his arms wide. “I regret the hour, but treason sleeps for no man.”

He paced the perimeter of the table, lion cloak snapping at his heels, letting his gaze rest long and pointed on Odrian where he stood between two of Nomaros’s guards.

“Three hours ago, a Tharon operative violated curfew within these lines. She was intercepted skulking near our grain stores. Coded intelligence on her lips, fever-phlegm in her lungs, and a child who may as well be a plague-vessel clutched to her chest.” He paused, savoring the silence. “And where is this saboteur now? Bleeding out in the King of Othara’s private bedchamber. Under his protection.”

Lauthen shifted, lounging back with a serpent’s smile. “Curious,” he mused, voice light as a feathered dart. “One might almost think she were his mistress, not his prisoner. Tell us, Odrian, does she translate pillow-talk as expertly as she translates codes?”

“She had no codes, Nomaros.” Odrian’s voice was crushed glass and gravel, scraped raw from screaming, but he forced it loud enough to cut through Nomaros’s theater. “She carried a fever remedy—a clay jar of bitterroot and willow, prescribed by your own camp healer, purchased with the seal I gave her. Nothing else. Unless you’ve decided that ‘treating a sick child’ constitutes espionage, in which case we should arrest half the camp followers. And Dionys, for good measure.”

He stepped forward, ignoring the way his legs tremored beneath him, and slammed his palm flat against the war-table map, smudging the charcoal lines.

“And she was alone. Stella—the girl—was in my tent, a full three minutes’ run from the grain stores. She wasn’t ‘clutched to her chest’ as some sickness wrapped in rags. She was sleeping off a fever that broke before midnight.”

He dragged his hand back and fixed Nomaros with a stare that tried for lethal. “You paint her as a saboteur skulking with plague and ciphers. The truth? A mother panicked when her daughter’s fever spiked, ran past curfew because she didn’t know the new rules were fixed rather than spoken, and got gutted by sentries who mistook a medicine jar for something nefarious.”

He turned, sweeping his gaze across the other kings. Lauthen with his smirk, Aurelis bored and picking his nails, Eranor ever watchful and silent.

“Yes, she’s Tharon. Yes, she ran. But if we start executing mothers for trying to keep their children alive, we might as well burn our own supply tents for kindling and declare victory for the crows.”

Nomaros laughed, low and sharp. “How very moving, Odrian. The mother. The medicine.” He circled the table, his hand trailing lightly across Lauthen’s shoulder, then Dionys’s. “You miss the forest for the sapling.”

He stopped behind Odrian, leaning close enough that his breath stirred the blood-matted hair at his temple. “Whether she carried ciphers or fever draught is irrelevant. She is Tharon. She violated curfew. She knows our routines, our stores, our patrol weaknesses—because you let her wander, bleeding and grateful, through the heart of our camp.” He straightened, slamming his scepter down on the table, making the charcoal jump. “And now you stand before this Council reeking of her blood, swaying on your feet like a drunkard, begging us to trust your judgment?”

“Enough.” Dionys leaned forward, his armor creaking in the sudden quiet, and placed his hand on the table. The map beneath his palm showed Thasar.

“She’s not a saboteur. She’s a survivor who ran for medicine and got a spear in her gut for it.” He fixed Nomaros with a flat stare, unblinking. 

Eranor lifted his hand. Not quickly, haste was the province of younger men, but with the slow gravity of stone settling into earth. The tent quieted, even Nomaros’s scepter stilled against the map table.

“Brothers,” he says, his voice dry as old parchment but carrying to the canvas walls, “we stand here debating the disposition of a woman who cannot stand herself. She bleeds, yes. In Odrian’s tent, under guard, with Askarion’s stitches holding her gut closed. She is not fleeing. She is not, at this moment, a threat to our grain or our codes.”

He leaned forward, his joints creaking like ship timbers, and fixed his gaze on the smudged charcoal Odrian left on the map. “But she is Tharon, and she came to us by stealth, not by parley. High King Nomaros speaks wisely of security. King Odrian speaks… passionately… of utility. These are not mutually exclusive paths.”

He turned his eyes to Nomaros, then to Odrian, measuring them both. “Ten days. Let the woman heal under guard until she can speak without delirium. Let Odrian demonstrate this ‘strategic value’ he claims. Translators do not grow from olive trees, and we have lost three scouts to Tharon ciphers this moon alone. If she proves useful, we have gained an asset. If she proves false…” he paused, letting the silence stretch like a bowstring. “…then she passes to the Formicari, and Aurelis may question her properly. Away from royal bedchambers and sentimental attachments.”

He settled back, his hands folding over the worn head of his walking staff. “The child stays with the healers. Fever or no, she is a complication we cannot afford in a stockade. Ten days. Then we decide if this bird sings or hangs.”